Visualities of strategic vision: Lookout Mountain Laboratory and the deterrent state from nuclear tests to Vietnam

Abstract

This article considers two visual cultures of America’s deterrent state in the Cold War, the cinematic and cybernetic, by following the history of the 600th Photographic Squadron of the United States (US) Air Force in Vietnam and its 1950s progenitor, the 1352nd Motion Picture Squadron, or Lookout Mountain Laboratory. We argue that cinematic and cybernetic visual cultures were at the heart of a Cold War visual alliance that was also a Cold War visual contest, and cameras were situated at the centre of the contest. Specifically, the cinematic and the cybernetic represent two distinct visualities of vision, as the Cold War cameras of the Air Force assumed either transcendental or transcendent positions. The former, in keeping with a cinematic visuality, was oriented towards casting America as a sight to see in the context of its war on communism, with cameras operating as a condition of possibility for the construction of the ‘image’, whereas the latter, in keeping with a cybernetic visuality, was oriented towards the American appetite to see, to monitor and survey the world over, with cameras operating as processors of ‘information’. The history of the 600th Photographic Squadron and its progenitor, Lookout Mountain Laboratory, suggests that the transition from cinematic to cybernetic visualities of vision was part of a broader transformation in the US Cold War state from a nuclear deterrent state to a supra-nuclear deterrent state.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kevin Hamilton

Kevin Hamilton is an artist and researcher with the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois. His research-based artistic work spans the domains of Public Art, New Media and the Digital Humanities. [email protected]

Ned O’gorman

Ned O’Gorman is an Associate Professor, Associate Head and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy and The Iconoclastic Shutter: Image, Catastrophe, and Economy in America Since the Kennedy Assassination (forthcoming, Chicago UP). [email protected]

This article is the product of the authors’ long-standing collaboration; the authors’ names are listed alphabetically.